Growing too quickly can create problems inside the business.
Orders pile up. Quality drops. Delivery times balloon. Customers complain. Your best people burn out trying to hold it together.
You’re making more revenue, but margins shrink because you’ve had to hire six people just to keep up.
Congratulations, you are now a busy idiot.
A real world example
My homeware business suffered these growing pains in 2024.
We were manually creating the sales assets for every product. Photography, graphic design, file management. It took a team of 8 contracted designers just to launch 100 products in a year.
Every new product cost hundreds in design fees before we’d sold a single unit. The team was constantly buried under repetitive work.
Since then we’ve automated the entire sales asset creation process.
Now I click a button. The system generates product images, handles file organisation, and outputs everything ready to go. What used to take a design team weeks now happens in minutes.
It never gets old clicking the button.
We went from 8 contractors down to 2 people supported by AI. We launched 400 products this year. Four times the output with a quarter of the team.
Better margins with no bottlenecks.
What Actually Works
Automate the repetitive work first. Look for tasks your team does manually every week. Data entry, file management, image generation, report creation. These are time sinks.
Start with your best people. Don’t cut staff to save money. Free up your top performers so they can focus on work that actually moves the business forward. Automation should amplify talent, not replace it.
Fix the bottleneck before you scale. If you can’t handle 100 orders smoothly, you definitely can’t handle 1,000. Build systems that scale before you pour more fuel on the fire.
The businesses that survive the next five years won’t be the ones with the biggest teams. They’ll be the ones that built systems to deliver more with less.
Because growth means nothing if it kills your margins.
If you would like to implement any of this in your business, get in touch.
